"Chas's trench erupted with
                  GREEN                   excitement. A small, brown man
                                          jabbered away in Spanish faster
             by John Goodrich             that I could follow.  Talented
                                          as ever, Chas yakked back just
             Copyright(c)1992             as fast, then climbed into the
                                          trench with him."

The sun blazed down into the clearing, loosing the steam, making the dig unbearable. I regretted all the chickens I had cooked in pits when I was a boy scout; now I knew how they felt. I was sweating like a pig in humid Peten jungle of Guatemala, unable to breathe, lakes of perspiration spreading across my back and forehead. I wished I had never heard of the Maya, or taken up European archaeology instead.

I managed ten native workers, while my fellow student from Peaslee University was managing fifteen. Chas had a heavier workload according to her experience and much greater facility with Spanish. Chas's working knowledge showed in the way she did everything, efficient, confident, brilliant. I, on the other hand, was on my first dig, and three years of university Spanish hadn't prepared me for what these workers spat at me. Too fast and heavily accented, I barely managed communication. I could have asked Chas to translate, but it would have been a sign of weakness, and I really didn't want to increase her stress level, calling her over every time someone wanted to talk to me. I just struggled on, the way I usually did.

This dig, for example. Everyone had to do some field work before they got a graduate degree in archaeology. This dismal little hole in the Peten was a recent discovery. About half a dozen students had signed up to go on the dig, but I was chosen because I had great grades in my classes. Of course I didn't know squat about Mesoamerican field archaeology. The Maya were my nominal area of specialty. I never imagined that the place would be so isolated. The most reliable method of getting to this dig was by mule. Here it is, the twentieth century, we've put a man on the moon, and I have to use a mule to get to and from an archaeological dig.

There were other things, the heat, the total humidity, the night noises, the malaria, the mosquitoes; nobody really impressed on me how bad it was. So here I was, sweating over my workers who were doing most of the heavy work. In Central America, we hire people to do our digging; it was the traditional way of things. Of course, being bored also seemed to be the traditional way of things.

I wandered over to Chas, who was between trench inspections herself. "Who was bored enough to go combing through satellite photos of Guatemala to find this place?" I asked her.

Chas laughed her bright, blonde laugh. I hate to say it, but she does laugh like a blonde. Yeah, she's got a master's, and is working on her Ph.D., but she laughs like a stupid blonde. Chas's hair was probably sandy, but a couple of months near the equator had bleached it almost as well as peroxide. She also had the most fascinating eyes - gray with flecks in them, like some sort of cracked rock crystal. Her bronze skin made her light eyes stand out even more.

She turned her tanned face with the bright eyes to me and smiled brightly. "Probably some poor CIA schmuck who didn't have Soviets to ogle any more. Your tax dollars at work, Dave. If I remember correctly, they found this when they were searching for Noriega."

"A bit far out for Noriega, isn't it?" I can never tell when she's pulling my leg.

"No, I'm absolutely serious. Apparently, the guy who found it was a Peaslee graduate, and he gave us first crack at it."

I had never though the CIA was good for much, and this news buttressed my position. Chas smiled brightly again. "Gotta go, work to do, you know."

I sighed, "Yeah, sure. See you in a few."

Bored, bored bored, bored, I thought, watching her go. Chas seemed to be the only bright spot in this dull, tense, sopping wet, overgrown forest. But then, I had left the excitement of being an EMT in New Haven, Connecticut. I had left that when some drug-crazed freak mistook me for a cop. I still had a puckered bullet scar in my shoulder from that encounter.

Chas's trench erupted with excitement. A small, brown man jabbered away in Spanish faster that I could follow. Talented as ever, Chas yakked back just as fast, then climbed into the trench with him. I sighed. I'd find out what it was at dinner tonight. If it was really good, I'd see it in a few minutes, but it didn't look like that was going to happen.

One of my own workers had found something interesting, however, so I came over to her trench. She handed up a series of brightly-colored pottery fragments, and I turned them over in my fingers. There were a few tantalizing bits of information, and a couple pieces linked up, but the fragments were too small to make anything conclusive. It could be weeks before they found any more pieces of this one. Dimly, I heard Chas's group erupting in conversation again, but I was concentrating on the pieces of pottery, cleaning them off with a toothbrush. The pieces were a polychrome drawing of a headdress, probably a priest's to judge from the complexity and . . .

Something touched my shoulder and I jumped. Pedro, one of Chas's workers was standing behind me. "Seenior Dave," he said in better English than most, "I theenk the seniorita needs help"

I spun around and looked at Chas's trench. She wasn't there, but her workers were crowding around the lip and waving to me.

My EMT training kicked into high gear, and I took charge, sort of. I told the shovel bums to back away from the trench and let me down into it. Chas had fallen in, her limbs splayed like those of a discarded doll. Her heartbeat was strong and regular, and her skin wasn't hot. No heat stroke, no heart attack, probably not malaria . . . . I shouted in Spanish for someone to go find Dr. Fossey. Fossey was out in what were the fields of the settlement, digging up dirt and pollen samples, trying to date the dig. Nobody wanted to go. Fossey didn't have a kind personality. I pitied any dog she had back in the states.

I turned back to Chas. Somewhere behind the emergency, I wondered at the jadeite spine she was holding in her right hand. Although stingray spines were kosher ritual gear, I couldn't think of any examples of jade ones. Usually the spines were obsidian or organic sea-ray cartilage. I shoved the thoughts aside and concentrated on what would be best for Chas, since the afternoon rain was due to start in about ten minutes, and I figured it would be good to keep her dry. The tents aren't much cooler than outside, but the principle of shelter made me feel better. Chas didn't react at all. Ten minutes later, Fossey burst into the tent, impatient to know what was going on. Chas was stirring weakly by then.

The sun was descending, already clotted by the rainforest outside the little clearing. Unusually, there was no rain this afternoon. There was almost always an afternoon rainfall in the Peten. That's why they called it a rain forest. Of course, it didn't help the humidity, which was higher than the temperature's ninety. At least the rains sometimes brought cooler air with them.

I sat at the table, and began to brush the mud and dirt off an obsidian eccentric that had been dug up two days earlier. I concentrated for a few minutes, brushing it with careful strokes of the beaten toothbrush I had bought just before I came to Guatemala. Layers of grunge came off, and it began to look like a banana clip with much of the Mahabarata being performed on top of it. Typical Mayan weirdness I thought. After about fifteen minutes, I was bored. I simply can't take the tedious work of archaeology without something else going on. I walked into my tent and brought out my treasured bag. The walkman had been a birthday present two years ago, and I was on the third set of batteries that month. They were also my last batteries until the supply mule came in another two weeks. I didn't know what I was going to do when this set went dead. I hate living away from civilization.

I fumbled with the walkman for a second, then delved into a thick stack of tapes, and came up with the Alarm's Standards. I slid in the tape and pressed play. A few seconds later, my world consisted of dirt, toothbrush, and Mike Peter's voice.

Six songs later, I jumped as someone put their hand on my shoulder. I whipped around, dragging the walkman to the soggy dirt in the process. Chas was there, looking down at me. She looked a bit pale, but otherwise all right. Sheepishly, I picked up the tape player and wiped the mud off it.

"Dave, I want to talk to you." Her voice was soft, and hot flash rushed down my spine. Damn heat I thought

"Sure," I said, "what about?" Chas walked over to my cot, pushed aside the mosquito netting, and sat in the shade.

"I had a real weird dream this afternoon. When I tried to pick up the spine, I..." she stopped, "this sounds really silly, but I dreamed I was at the site when it was active. It was pretty weird..." her voice trailed off. She wasn't really talking to me, I realized, she was talking to get this out. She looked at me again. "I usually don't dream. And this one was so very, well, vivid. I don't know, forget I said anything." She got off the cot, and started to leave, but I stopped her.

"Tell me about it Chas," I blurted, then hesitated, the words damming in my throat. "I want to hear."

Chas looked at her toes for a second, then drew patterns in the soggy dirt with a boot, and sat back down. "It was weird. I felt like I wasn't really there - sort of like a ghost I guess." She was looking at her toes again. "The jungle was cleared. There were people, all sorts of people, just milling around in, in here." She made a sweeping gesture, indicating the clearing and probably the jungle behind it. "There were rows of crops growing in the fields, and the temple looked sharp and new. There were people, too. I saw about a hundred people in the central square." She fell silent, and something hung in the air between us.

Suddenly, her beautiful eyes sparked. "Hey, where's the spine?"

"I dunno," I said stupidly, then caught up with her thoughts. "Uh. We better go get it before some digger decides that it'd make a nice piece to sell . . . " Chas was already headed for her trench. I tore off my headphones and ran after her.

I caught up with her as she climbed back into the three meter wide pit carved across what had been the central court of the settlement. I climbed down and saw Chas standing near where she had fallen. She was crouching near the spine. It was still there, but Chas seemed reluctant to touch it. Not thinking, I bent down and picked it up.

An electric shock jolted up my arm, as if I had stuck a pin in a socket. Chas was gone.

Bewildered, I stood up, looking for her. She had been right next to me when I picked up the spine, and now she wasn't. I climbed out of the trench to find her.

I was somewhere else. Instead of a small glade carved out of a rainforest, I was at a completely restored Maya site. I looked behind me and discovered that the trench had disappeared. People were walking around, the square busy with the comings and doings of these people dressed as ...classic Maya.

Wait a minute.

I closed my eyes and shook my head to clear it. I was not in the center of a Maya city. The inhabitants of the city were not walking around me. When I opened my eyes, nothing had changed.

The temple of the Old Ones was no longer a crumbling relic, but a recently carved, pure white edifice. The comb on top of it stood like an extended middle finger to the sky. Every possible surface of the walls was carved, intricate and delicate bas relief so sharp it was almost painful to look at. I was used to the crumbling and weathered modern carvings, ruined by ten centuries of rain, wind and water, but here they were, fresh, less than a century old. This would be a major find - to see these carvings in the original condition . . . Snap out of it, shithead, I thought. This isn't real, I'm just seeing what I want to see. Any minute I'm going to wake up and this will all be a dream. Any minute now . . .

Beyond the carved temple were rows of wheat and maize, rippling in the wind like a golden ocean. The sky was dark with rolling clouds, and I smelled the threat of rain. Lightning jumped between clouds, and the retort of thunder rumbled in the humid sky.

Well, I thought, Might as well enjoy it while I'm out of it. I noticed that I was still carrying the green spine. Absently, I flipped it in the air.

With a jarring thud, I landed in the watery muck at the bottom of Chas's trench. Chas was standing over me, gently shaking my head.

"Aaag, shit, quit it . . . " I thrashed around, knocking the cool hands off my face. Silently, Chas withdrew. Her face was concerned, and the sky above her was darker than I remembered it.

"What happened? All I remember was touching the spine and then I was in this weird Maya place . . . "

Chas just raised an eyebrow, but it was enough. I stopped babbling and blinked a few times. We both looked at the green spine that was a few inches from my right hand. We looked at each other, unspoken understanding rushing through each of us.

Chas was the first to open her mouth. "This is too weird." She seemed to be taking this fairly well.

I wasn't. "I ain't touching that thing. No way."

Chas took off her hat and used the brim to scoop up the green menace, careful not to let her skin touch it. "I think I'll put this someplace nice and safe," she said, wrapping the hat tightly around her prize.

I raised an eyebrow. "Where? Wait, what are you going to do with that thing?"

Her cracked crystal eyes glowed. "This is an unprecedented opportunity to do research. Think of it! For the first time since Cortez, we have an opportunity to observe the Maya as they were."

I let my scepticism show. "Right, sure. How the hell are you going to publish this? Who's going to believe you?" I was warming to the argument. I didn't like this green thing at all, and I really didn't want Chas using it. Especially not Chas. "What are you going to do, conduct guided tours of this place and pass that thing around?"

She wasn't listening. She had climbed out of the trench and was heading for her tent. I jogged to catch up with her in the deepening Peten blackness. "Come on. What are you going to do with that?"

She stopped, and I caught up with her. Her eyes looked up at me, and my face flushed under the attention. She spoke quietly, "This is the perfect archaeological tool. We can go back and watch them as they were. I'll publish my findings as deductions. What's the problem?"

I pursed my lips. I knew I was being irrational. I took a hold of her elbow. "I don't like that thing. It scares me. Please leave it? Chas, please?"

Her eyes dropped. "I can't. This is too important."

I couldn't accept it. I flailed around to find something that would stop her. "What are you going to do when this stint is up? Pass it along to the next person from Peaslee who comes along? How about Dr. Fussy, she'd get a real kick out of this thing." I smiled at the thought.

She returned a wry grin, and brushed an errant golden hair out of her mouth. "God, you're right. She'd go around pointing out all the things they were doing wrong." A light chuckle flickered between us.

The smile faded, and she looked straight into my eyes. "I'm going to use it." She reached out, and gave my hand a squeeze, then walked into the mist towards her tent. The nocturnal monkeys were just beginning to howl as I walked to my tent.

The next day, it was business as usual, no mention of the spine, Chas was just as bright and cheery as she always was. We dug and in the hot afternoon, I brushed the mud from onyx and pottery. Chas went about her duties, chatting with the diggers and Fussy cataloging the pottery, the eccentrics, and drawing the carvings on the temple. I watched Chas closely, but it wasn't until two weeks later that I noticed her drawing was much more detailed than the weathered carvings.

There were other signs. She had a whole section of her sketch book that she didn't show to anyone, and for the first time, she argued with Dr. Fossey about site use and management. Chas's new theories were fresh and deviated from her previous ideas, and she wouldn't budge one inch from them. I tried to keep out of the discussions as they escalated. After three weeks, they were regularly shouting at each other.

One night, about a month after we had discovered the spine, I broke from sleep to the dark, muggy black of the Peten. The howling monkeys were mating in the trees, shrieking loudly at each other. It had taken me two weeks to learn to sleep through a whole night. Something else was out there . . .

"Dave?"

It was just the ghost of a whisper, barely audible over the screams of the primates.

"Chas?" I called, "Jesus, come in."

She came in, legs stiff, arm movements jerky. Her face was a tight, inexpressive mask. I gathered the sheet around my thighs, as Chas pushed aside the mosquito netting and climbed onto the cot. She sat stiffly on the other end, her breathing sharp, and punctuated.

"Chas? Chas? What's wrong?"

She was slow in responding. Her voice was raw, and her eyes forlorn when she finally looked at me. "They're scared, Dave. Something's wrong with them."

"What? I don't get it. What's wrong?"

She swallowed once, then spoke in a low gravelly voice. "They made a sacrifice. They took a prisoner and they suh- sacrificed him."

All the blood drained from my face, and I felt queasy. Evidence said that Maya prisoner sacrifices were long, drawn-out and incredibly bloody affairs. Although they didn't practice the wholesale slaughters the Aztecs had, the Maya seemed to have had a particular genius for truly unpleasant torture. Supposedly, blood was collected from a live prisoner and then burned for the gods, giving them vitality. Blood from a living victim was more potent than dead blood, so it made a twisted sort of sense to get the highest "miles per gallon," as it were, by keeping the unfortunate victim alive as long as possible.

Chas continued. "They drove a," she swallowed, and licked her lips, "a spine through his tongue, and then, they drew a cord through it. I think it was eight feet, Dave. Then th-they took the same spine and p-pierced his lips and penis." I shuddered at the same time she did. "God, he screamed for over an hour," she covered her ears, as if she could hear him now, a thousand years later.

She drew herself into a tighter ball-- self-contained and impenetrable. She didn't weep, but her breath came in gasps. We sat for a while. I longed to take her into my arms and hold her, but I couldn't. She sat alone at the other side of my bed, a hundred miles away.

All I found to say ten minutes later was, "why didn't you drop the spine?"

Oddly enough, the question relaxed her somewhat, and she looked up at me with her beautiful eyes red and puffy. She sighed deeply, almost embarrassed by the answer that was coming. "I- I couldn't. I knew I couldn't go back if he was still alive. I wouldn't be able to face that screaming again" She avoided looking at me, sighing again. "Whatever else they were, Dave, they were butchers and savages. I guess it never really occurred to me what they were."

My mind groped for something to say - something to make her feel better. I dredged up a quote from an anthropologist I had known at Peaslee. "It's a different culture. We're not here to judge right from wrong. We must try to be as impartial as we can."

It was the wrong thing to say. She brushed aside the mosquito netting and stood up. "Their fucking priest poked fucking holes in his fucking body and they all just fucking stood there and watched him do it! Don't you fucking tell me to ignore it! Torture is not something fucking civilized people do, is it?" Outside, the monkeys began shrieking again. Her face was drawn back into a skull of anger. She whirled out of the dark confines of the tent and left running.

I was alone with a sunk feeling in my stomach. I had done the wrong thing, again. I mentally replayed the conversation five times, each time coming up with something better to say. Going after her wouldn't do any good, so I lay down on the cot again. I slept after half an hour of silent tears

I dreamed that night. I dreamed I was in New Haven, in an ambulance, heading for a call. It was a tractor-trailer accident, I remembered. We got to the scene, and it was a mess; the truck had struck a car and then run it over, crushing it. There couldn't be anything alive in the car, I thought. We proceeded with the extraction, and got out most of a young couple, probably out for a date. Neither was breathing. We did it all - intubation, two IV's, Adenosine, defibrilation. Nothing worked, so we had at start CPR and artificial respiration. I was working with blood all over my hands, pressing in the column-fractured ribs, watching the chest collapse and rebound liquidly with only a few ribs to support it. One, two three, four; breathe. One, two three, four; breathe. I heard behind me that LifeStar was coming and I shouted for them to get a doctor on board. A doctor could declare the two corpses dead. We couldn't. I kept pumping; one, two, three, four; breathe. One, two three, four; breathe. There was no response, and I hadn't expected one, but I had to keep the pace. One, two three, four; breathe. One, two three, four; breathe. Then I noticed the people around me were packing up and getting ready to leave. The other victim was sitting up and talking to a fireman. They all started to leave, and I was still sitting on the guy's chest, pumping away: one, two three, four; breathe.

Slowly, one by one, everyone else left - the ambulance, the police, the fire truck. Everyone. The woman from the car seemed to have struck up a friendship with the one of the fireman, and they went off together in his car. Lifestar never came, but I was still there, pumping away, one, two, three, four; breathe. One two, three, four; breathe. My arms ached and I was light-headed. One, two, three, four; breathe. One two, three, four; breathe. Everyone else left until it was just me in the middle of the street, legally bound to keep working CPR until relieved by a doctor. Each push was an effort, my whole body aching with each pump. One. Two. Three. Four. Breathe. One. Two. Three. Four.

I woke up sweating, my arms aching. My glowing watch face told me it was twenty past two in the morning. I slowed my breathing and wished for something stiff to drink. This shit's really getting to me I thought.

A week later, I sneaked into Chas's tent to have a look at her journal. Chas was off analyzing pollen samples with Fossey, and I figured they'd be at it for some time. Her sketch pad was sitting on her cot. Feeling guilty, and looking furtively around me, I peeked at the drawings.

They were amazing. I hadn't realized the extent of Chas's artistic talents. There were more than two dozen sketched of faces- the young, the old, and sometimes the clothes they wore. I noticed that they all wore a look of worry- deep lines furrowed around the tightly close mouths and into foreheads. These people were scared, and Chas's art made them seem very real. At times it was like the mass of faces was staring at me, accusing me. There was a full-page picture of a priest at the foot of the Old Ones' temple. He had apparently fallen down the steep front stairs. His head was twisted at an impossible angle, the side of his head smashed against the paving stones.

Later, there was a written account of her travels, Chas's crabbed handwriting describing the smells, sounds, and other things that couldn't be drawn. There was more than eight pages to it, so I quickly skimmed to the last entry.

"These people are terrified. I think that they have in some way offended their gods. Everyone has this doomed look that I can see in their eyes and faces. There is also what looks like a hurricane approaching. The first rain was beginning to fall, and they looked at the sky like it was the end of the world. The funny part is, they all gathered in the center of the ceremonial green and stood there. Some were weeping, others looking stoically up into the rain. I don't remember anything like this in any reference. They just keep looking at the sky, as if they expected the wrath of God to come down."

I was scared. If this little magic widget worked, maybe the Old Gods were not as imaginary as we thought they were. One rational part of my mind told me that this was nonsense, and that there were no pagan gods. I remembered that this was the same part of my mind that said I hadn't been back to a classic Maya site. I didn't know which side to believe. I threw the sketch book back on her bed and ran out of the tent, my brain buzzing.

I took Chas aside that night, after dinner. "Don't go out tonight." I had wanted to say more, but words collided in my throat like boxcars. I wanted to say "I care" or maybe more, but I couldn't.

She only gave me an odd look and went back to her tent.

She didn't come back that night. We discovered a breathing corpse in the morning, eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of drool on her cheek. The marvelous light in her eyes gone, replaced by a dull, filmy gray, like a rock worn smooth by a stream. Chas was gone. While everyone else was buzzing about trying to figure out what was wrong with her, I found the jade spine where she had dropped it. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuffed it into a corner of her trunk.

The Guatemalans were going to send a four-wheel drive vehicle to come and get Chas. It probably would take at least two days, but I spent my time packing, trying to keep my mind off the breathing corpse in Chas's tent. Technically, there was nothing wrong with her; just no brain activity. She breathed, and she swallowed when stimulated, but her eyes didn't react to light, and they never moved. I told Fossey that I'd be shipping out with ChasI couldn't take the stress. I was glad that she hadn't fought; I was in no shape to argue with her. When the sun went down that day, I only had one more thing to do.

I gathered one of the sledgehammers and my trowel. After searching around for a few minutes I found a pair of beaten leather gloves and a belt pouch. I went back to Chas's tent, and plundered her green treasure, and took the thing out into the jungle.

The monkeys were in a fury that night, screaming as if one of them had been murdered, or sacrificed. I shuddered, hearing the echoes of a dead man's agony. Maybe the Maya taught them to scream that way.

I found a flat rock, and took out the spine to look at it. It had a sharp tip, with a slightly rougher edge at the other end. Slowly, deliberately, I looked down the hollow shaft, and saw a fine lace of carvings on the surface I hadn't noticed before. It was slippery smooth, and I almost dropped it as I turned it over in the unfeeling gloves.

Curiosity satisfied, I put it on the flat rock. It sort of gleamed as it sat there, a small instrument of death, a gateway to the past. The only piece of real magic I had ever known. I sat next to it for several long minutes, tempted to rip off the gloves and be transported to the past, perhaps to find Chas there. I took off the gloves and reached for it, then checked myself.

Suddenly resolute, I stood, and brought the sledge down. The spine pulsed with energy an instant before impact, then tiny pieces of green squirted out from under the sledge. I didn't believe what I had done for an instant. Ripping off my gloves, I knelt by the rock and put my bare flesh on the mashed green spot that had been the spine. For a second, tiny jolts tickled my fingers, like static from a television. Then nothing. I sat with my head in my hands, tears streaming down my face, but my sobs were lost to the howls of the monkeys.

John Goodrich was born in New Hampshire in 1969, and returned there in 1988 to go to college. He is currently a graduate student at New Mexico State University, studying to be a high school english teacher. He obviously has far too much time on his hands.

jgoodric@nmsu.edu